


Concussion (I can't title my stories to save my life)

by taylor_tut



Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: Concussions, Gen, Head Injury, Hurt Jaskier | Dandelion, Hurt/Comfort, Jaskier | Dandelion Whump, Sick Character, Sickfic, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-16
Updated: 2020-02-16
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:55:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22749694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taylor_tut/pseuds/taylor_tut
Summary: A request from my tumblr! Jaskier hits his head while they're on a beastie hunt and doesn't mention anything to Geralt. Geralt is not happy about it.
Comments: 22
Kudos: 749





	Concussion (I can't title my stories to save my life)

The first thought Jaskier could string together after the insectoid knocked him to the ground was that Geralt’s back was turned to it. Though the air had been knocked from his lungs, he managed to gasp out his name. 

“Geralt! Another!” 

The functional problem was that Geralt was still preoccupied, so while Jaskier had no doubt that he’d heard the warning, there wasn’t much he could do. The creature reared up on its hind legs and Jaskier did the only thing he could think to do: he swept its legs from underneath it, scrambling to his own feet to fight it off. 

He wouldn’t last long; he knew that. He only had to last long enough for Geralt to come through.

The creature fell on its back but didn’t stay there for more than one horrible second, becoming visibly angrier. Jaskier grabbed a tree branch he’d nearly tripped over just moments before they were suddenly wrapped up in the fight, brandishing it threateningly as the creature got to its many feet once more. 

“Geralt!” Jaskier shouted, trying and failing to keep the panicked edge from his tone. 

“Busy!” was the clipped reply. 

When the beast threw itself at Jaskier, instinct did not take over. His arms did not react on their own; he was not overcome with a sudden knowledge of how to fight brought on by necessity alone; he could not decide to parallel any of the things he’d seen Geralt do hundreds of times. 

He held the stick out straight in front of him and the beast impaled itself with a horrid shriek, throwing Jaskier backward hard against a rock. His eyes rolled back and as much as he wanted to watch the fight, wanted to scurry off to safety on the sidelines, the pain was immobilizing. 

The sound had been enough to distract the other beast and Geralt did not waste the advantage, skewering it through in one quick motion before sprinting toward the second. 

He wasn’t sure for how long they fought, though knowing Geralt better than probably most anyone had known him before, he could deduce that the fight was fairly short. The second was much smaller, anyway, so he was confident that Geralt could handle it and he let his eyes slip shut for a moment. 

The next thing he was aware of was Geralt’s approaching footsteps and the silence of the forest. 

“You got it?” Jaskier asked, taking the hand that Geralt offered to pull him up and blinking against the black dots which stole his vision once upright. The position made his head throb just as badly as hitting it on the rock had. 

“Hmm,” Geralt grunted. Jaskier nodded. 

“Good job.”

“You did very well,” he said, and Jaskier smiled at the rare compliment. 

“I didn’t do anything,” Jaskier shrugged. “Just grabbed a stick.” 

“And ran it through,” Geralt added. He was examining the creature with a benign interest, seemingly impressed by the technique more than scared of its still-twitching form. “It might have taken a few hours to fully succumb, but you fatally wounded it. Even if I hadn’t finished the job.”

Jaskier tried not to show his pride on his face. 

“Had you not finished the job, it would have killed me well before it died.”

Geralt didn’t acknowledge that because Jaskier was right: as soon as he’d impaled it, the creature had begun to rear up to attack again even despite its injuries—no, because of them, Jaskier thought. Perhaps he’d dealt a blow that would have had it eventually scurrying deeper into the forest to bleed out in solitude, but it would have been scurrying away from Jaskier’s corpse had Geralt not sliced its head off while it was stunned. 

“You’re not hurt, are you?” Jaskier asked. It was a ritual after each battle to check in on him, despite that it didn’t really matter because Geralt always said he was fine either way. 

“Barely a scratch,” Geralt predictably declined, but he appeared to be telling the truth. Jaskier wanted to tell him about his head wound, but Geralt was already walking away, and he wasn’t about to complain to a clearly-unconcerned Witcher’s retreating back. Without turning around, Geralt grabbed the heads of both creatures, surprisingly small for their size, and fastened them to Roach’s saddlebags. 

Well, there went the hope that maybe he could ride into town instead of walking. 

“We’ve got to get the heads to the Prince by sundown.” 

As always, Jaskier swallowed what he wanted to say and followed a good distance behind. 

By the time they reached the village, which wasn’t terribly far, Jaskier was so far beyond tired that he couldn’t even think straight. He was pretty sure that he’d been talking, but he wasn’t sure what about. He knew that to Geralt, nearly everything he said sounded like disjointed mumblings, but he had to wonder whether speaking was so second nature to him that he could do it without even thinking, or if Geralt really just tuned out everything he said, like he claimed he did. 

Jaskier’s head was still ponding, but he swallowed the complaints he wanted to make. Geralt would only find it annoying, anyway, and it’s not as if they could do anything about a headache here. He might have asked to ride Roach if he didn’t think that the motion would be even more nauseating than just walking. Besides, he’d only been allowed to ride her once, and it was after the djinn incident, and that had been extenuating circumstances. That had been life or death, and a headache wasn’t life or death: requesting to take it easy would be to ask Geralt to do him a kindness rather than to do the bare minimum required to keep him alive, and Geralt had yet to so much as refer to Jaskier as a friend aloud, so he figured that wouldn’t happen. 

So he followed along, in a seemingly endless cycle of falling further and further behind, then barely catching up before Geralt snapped something rude to him and continued ahead until his lead was so great that he had to stop again. 

Jaskier stopped even registering when Geralt was speaking to him because it was only ever an annoyed remark or a half-hearted insult. Every now and again, Jaskier would apologize for his pace, and Geralt would pretend he didn’t hear it. 

Or maybe he really didn’t. It was difficult to tell how loudly he was speaking over the ringing in his ears. 

Eventually, things started to blur together: the forest, the path, the sound of the wind through the trees and the gentle clop of Roach’s hooves against the hard, still-frozen dirt. 

Jaskier was becoming aware of moments of nothingness: he’d notice a chunk of time had passed, but wouldn’t be able to recall what he’d been thinking about or saying. Not all the beginnings of his sentences had endings, and, though it wasn’t altogether unusual for him to talk about absolutely nothing on the road like this, he rarely rambled, but now, when he would snap back into lucidity, he’d realize that he’d been telling a story that Geralt already knew or asking a question that made no sense. 

Geralt was willing to let Jaskier’s constantly-shifting focus slide for a long time. In fact, he let it go until they were on the road into the town, close enough to the castle that if it weren’t so foggy out, he’d have been able to see it. The choppy, inconsistent conversation, the slow pace, the drama with which he tripped over his own feet, he could ignore, but he put his foot down when Jaskier asked, “where are we going?” 

Exhaustion and coming down from a good scare might make him a bit spacey, sure, but there was no reason he could forget where they were headed and why. 

He stopped in his tracks and caught Jaskier when he ran into Roach, nearly toppling backward afterward. 

He couldn’t put his finger on it, but something didn’t feel right. A sense of foreboding made the hairs on his arms stand on edge as Jaskier wavered back and forth a little, trying and failing to find his center of balance once more. He couldn’t seem to get his bearings.

The annoyance melted away and in the center of it, he found what the hard shell of irritability had been protecting: a soft, tender underbelly of worry. 

“What do you mean, ‘where are we going?’” Geralt asked. “The same place we were not half a week ago. To the castle.” 

Jaskier didn’t really look surprised, but he also didn’t quite look like he remembered, either. It was as if the words hadn’t even landed. 

“Oh,” was all he said. 

Geralt sighed. “I think you should rest,” he suggested. “We’ll get a room at the inn before I go to see the King.” 

Jaskier’s face lit up in relief, and Geralt supposed that he must really be exhausted. He didn’t blame him—even Geralt himself could feel it, and his body could handle quite a lot more than Jaskier’s could. 

He’d offer to let him ride Roach, but in the few times Jaskier had tried in the past to mount her, she’d gotten angry about it and thrown him off. The last thing they needed to do right now was add a broken neck to Jaskier’s list of complaints. 

Instead, Geralt just slowed his pace so Jaskier could keep up without straining and headed straight for the inn, where he purchased one room for the two of them and settled Jaskier into it. 

“I still need to collect our coin,” Geralt said, and Jaskier, tracking the conversation for the first time in what felt like hours, looked confused. 

“You mean your coin,” he corrected, because that’s how Geralt always functioned: he collected the money from a beast hunt and that money was his, while Jaskier made his own source of income in the form of tips, which came in much more bountifully than they ever had before. People had no choice but to believe his stories with Geralt standing right there as the proof he’d lived them, and who wouldn’t let their morbid sense of intrigue get the better of them and go pay a few coins to listen to a song that might explain whatever horrible monster guts Geralt had entered their villages covered in?

“Not this time,” Geralt said, not bothering to look him in the eyes as he dealt with setting their things down. “You dealt a blow, and a good one. You’ve earned a share.” 

Jaskier smiled widely. He didn’t even need to know how much Geralt was planning on giving him—he couldn’t care less about the coin. It was the fact that Geralt had told him he’d earned it. 

‘Stay here,” Geralt commanded as soon as he’d dealt with their bags. “I’ll not be long.” 

Geralt gave Jaskier ample time to rest. After presenting the heads of the beasts to the Pince and receiving the payment, he used it to buy himself a hot bath, in which he took his time washing up. Monster blood didn’t come off without quite a bit of scrubbing, after all, and this was a good time to do it, because Jaskier had seemed exhausted a few hours ago when he’d helped him into bed. 

When he finished his bath and found that he could think of no more ways to kill time, Geralt went back to their room. 

He knocked on the door as he opened it but ddn’t wait for a reply, and, predictably, Jaskier was asleep in the bed. 

He wished he could let him sleep a bit longer—hell, they didn’t have to be on the road again until afternoon the next day, so if he really needed to, he could sleep all the way through the evening, the night, and the morning. 

However, it had been far too long since either of them had eaten anything, so he called Jaskier’s name to rouse him.

Jaskier sat straight up in bed, his eyes rolling around dazedly for a moment. 

“Geralt?” Jaskier called, as if it could be anyone else. 

“Hm,” he replied. Jaskier rolled over in the bed to face the wall opposite Geralt. He sighed. “I’m going to the kitchens for a meal,” he announced. “You’re joining me.”

Jaskier made a low whine in the back of his throat, so quiet that Geralt mightn’t have heard it without his enhanced ears. 

“M’tired,” Jaskier slurred. 

“And you need to eat to regain strength.” Jaskier shook his head, which began a familiar headache in a Jaskier-related spot in his brain. “Get up and dressed.” 

Jaskier made no move to do so.

“Jaskier,” he tried again. Nothing. Finally, he lost his temper, storming to the bedside and yanking the blankets away. It earned him a glare, but one that was much more intent, more serious than Jaskier’s normal. 

“Fuck off,” Jaskier snapped with venom, a tone so harsh that Geralt could hardly believe it had come from the tiny, cheerful bard. When he rolled back over onto his other side this time, Geralt could see the dried blood on his pillow and he froze.

“What’s the mater with you?” Geralt demanded, a bit more harshly than he’d intended. Jaskier looked offended.

“Nothing,” he bit. “M’tired. Leave me alone.”

Geralt took a step toward him, kneeling beside the bed. “Not like that,” he clarified. “You just seem… Not yourself.” Jaskier was silent for a long moment, processing. “Something is wrong and I want you to tell me what.”

“I feel… drunk,” he admitted. Geralt didn’t like that he seemed not to have an answer, basing his mental state on feeling and clues rather than memory. 

“You haven’t been drinking,” he asserted. “I’d smell it.” 

Jaskier tried to stand, but his legs shook beneath him and he swayed as if he couldn’t find his balance. He certainly looked drunk, and if not for his confidence in his Witcher senses, Geralt might have believed him. 

“Did you hit your head?” 

Jaskier, once more, stared at him dumbly. “When?” 

“Come here,” Geralt demanded. Predictably, Jaskier obeyed, staggering toward and then into him. Geralt caught him by the shoulders and that was when he could smell the blood. More gingerly than he’d have ever been capable of before they’d met, Geralt reached around the back of Jaskier’s head and probed gently with his fingers for a wound. The hiss of pain answered his question and so did the dried blood he found matted in his hair. 

“Damn,’ Geralt cursed. “I should have known.” Really, he ought to have at least asked Jaskier if he was alright as soon as he’d helped him to his feet after the attack. Jaskier had asked him, after all, and he hadn’t even hit the ground. He wished he could blame adrenaline, but he knew that the real reason he hadn’t asked was that he’d thought that if Jaskier was asking about his wellbeing, that he’d already taken care of his own.

A foolish assumption. 

“I’m going to fetch a doctor.”

Jaskier frowned, then reached one hand up to Geralt’s cheek, pressing the back of his palm to it before turning his small hand around to cup Geralt’s cheek. 

“Are you ill?” Jaskier asked, so much concern bleeding from his one that it made Geralt wonder just how much he made Jaskier worry, how often Jaskier wanted to care for him but swallowed the sentiment for fear of being rejected for coddling. 

“No,” he said gently, patiently. He’d never had much reason to be patient before and the muscle was weak, unfamiliar to exercise. This was straining it, and if he pushed it much further, he knew it would snap. “I’ll be back. Don’t move until I return.” 

Jaskier allowed himself to be pushed back against the pillows and nodded as he allowed exhaustion to drag him into the first restful sleep he’d gotten in ages.


End file.
